Yeah, and it even works with PDFs. Airtable has PDF Gallery view but Notion and Coda look old here.
I really like Coda, but I’m so tired of the workspace limitations.
Recently I tried some *.csv imports with thousands of entries. Airtable gave up, Coda managed but became slow, Fibery had the best import options and did not slow down. I’m finally getting a paid account.
Fibery provides an excellent PKM system. Only Latex and Mermaid is missing..
Neither Notion, Coda or Obsidian enables merging cells in tables.
Oh Great!!!
btw. this Mermaid-thing is increasingly valuable because AI can create great overviews in Mermaid format. However, I can use Notion to organize my Mermaids-Graphs on a free plan.
I agree, we will see what we could do.
BTW, for me PKM use case is always weird for Fibery. We never designed Fibery for this and I think Notion and Obsidian just won this niche.
What are your thoughts about it? Why not Notion or Obsidian?
I tried almost every PKM on this planet.
I love Obsidian. But in the end every topic fits in a database.
e.g. for Fragrances: A list of fragrances with a list of ingredients + a list of notes + etc.
For privat use Obsidian would be sufficient with the bases update.
On a professional level I’m dealing with thousands of ingredients with dozens of blacklists, depending on country and product.
I might have a product with 50 ingredients. Will I have a problem with e.g. shipping to Taiwan?
simple copy-and-paste in a related-list and I get the regulatory context with Fibery (works also in Coda + Airtable). But this does not work in Notion (or Baserow). In addition, Notion is not build for databases with thousands of entries. Besides that I only miss Mermaid support in Fibery (in Coda that would cost significantly extra). Yeah, columns in rich-text-fields would be nice in Fibery but it is not essential. Import tables is also easier in Notion and Notion supports chemical formula formatting via equations. The Gallery view now made me finally switch to Fibery.
I know Fibery since the early days. It is really great to see it evolve into such a mature and usable application.
I think the core of a great PKM is the databases and the relation between them, the second big “must” is an easy visualization of your data. Well, surprise! Fibery has the best of both.
Yes, your product is designed for such complex systems and that is why as PKM is so powerful. The biggest problem with other tools like Airtable, Notion, Coda, is their performance. Yeah they might be easier to use but trust me, Fibery is getting really easy for beginners as well.
So yeah, Fibery is much powerful, much stronger, incredibly powerful whiteboards, amazing DB relation. The PKM is no more a side effect, it is a well built system and more people are noticing it.
I am also a Solo user, and chose Fibery because of the great improvements, community and awesome features. I know many more single users will find Fibery and stay here because of all the mentioned above.
Nowadays everyone tries to create their best app or system and jumps between all the different platforms, but you never see such honesty and transparency from any other platform. As user, that will always be gold.
Maybe is time for Fibery to realize that many people could use it not only as a company system, but as a personal space. You are way better than the competitors out there. Is just Fibery’s choice if you want to stay under a Company structure or also for personal use (why not both) because if you let single users come and create PKMs they will be really happy.
I can’t speak for the broader community, but the deprecation of external data is a bummer for me.
I can say I have tried three times to get the Postgres database working, reached out to support about it, never got anything but errors. I finally gave up and run those reports outside Fibery. So I’m not surprised use looks low when it was truly unusable.
And I was just about to use the CSV link source
There are some data sources that are impossible, or increasingly too much of a headache to keep synced as native Fibery entities when I just want to read them into a report. KPIs are one of those. GitLab issues are increasingly like that for me too. I currently do sync them but I don’t really need to and the integration breaks every week or two.
100% agree, and I think Notion handles this duality very well. It is in fact part of the “secret” to their success: people start out personal users because the barrier to entry is very low (free plan, ease of use) and then bring it in to work. There are probably ways to make this flywheel work even better with some thought and well-chosen features/tools.
One way to do this that feels simple would be to allow users a limited number of db’s in their personal space – private, but shareable (even view-only) databases for their own personal use case.
This would be a great start for my team in managing meeting notes or personal goals/objectives.
Perhaps it’s more complicated than I’m imagining it to be, but the use cases are so vast.
The only reason we did not do that yet is scalability limitations. Right now it is not technically possible to have more than 1500 databases in a single workspace. This limitation is mainly about relations, next year we are going to change that and it should open up the possibility to add private databases for users
I’ve experienced people get scared with the “10 databases” limit. Coming from something like notion or Monday, where you make a new board/database per project, I’ve sensed some reluctance when explaining the 10 db limit. I need to really explain why it’s enough for a lot cases. Most people don’t understand it without trying, and won’t try it without understanding their problem can be solved for free.
I think Fibery has improved a lot in the UX. It won’t get to the “Notion easy of use” level, but that is fine, because Fibery is more powerful. But if you show single users how easy it is to populate a DB, have a relation to another one, and after that show the New Gallery View or the Whiteboard, no questions asked, single users will get Fibery’s idea and even learn the one or two tricks.
And probably that is a big down for a PKM user; many users might already have a system with hundreds of pages/tables/DB for anything, and other tools can give it for free.I think unlimited DBs for the free plan could have a huge impact on PKM community. But that is just my opinion.
A lot of us watch the Reddit comments and realize most single users look for a new tool due to the performance, information getting lost, hard maintenance, etc. I am sure Fibery is way superior in all of that.
Like I mentioned before, Fibery has everything to offer for single users as well; it is up to the company if they want to get the attention of them or just keep advertising it as an enterprise resource.
If the Fibery free plan included unlimited dbs (but still offered up to 10 users) then a significant number of current customers, would be able to downgrade and stop paying
If you’re suggesting a ‘solo’ plan with unlimited dbs, then this would match what Fibery used to offer.
Part of the reason why the free plan includes more than one user is to allow people to discover the benefits of collaboration, without having to commit to paying.
I think we would be reluctant to change that, and introducing two types of ‘free’ plan would be weird.
TLDR we have to have some limits on the free plan if we want to survive
Notion kind of does this. It’s one “Free Plan” but if you have only one person in the workspace, they have no limit on number of blocks, but a free plan with more than 1 user in the workspace has a limit on the number of blocks. It makes it a bit confusing, but it could allow for this middle-ground. Just food for thought.
Yeah, maybe the free plan could have the unlimited DBs for just a single user and above Standar-Plan unlocks the collaboration. Allowing hundreds of single users to try it and even upgrade. Anyway, the Free Trial allows you to explore the collaboration features as well.
Me as a single user, even if the free plan had unlimited DBs, would 100% upgrade again to unlock the Whiteboards and views that are so worth it. And the price of the Standard plan as single user is fair.
But as you mention, might not be easy to change and is probably not Fibery’s vision right now. (Might be worth to think about it, knwing that your product is way better than the competition ).
When I was on Notion, they did exactly that (I don’t know if they still do or not). You signed up for ‘the’ free plan: if you wanted unlimited databases, great - only you. If you wanted to share, boom, your DB limit was introduced – if you wanted both, well, sign up for $10 or $20 a month. I thought it was a fair tradeoff at the time and appreciated the opportunity to build out my system with just me, knowing that I’d start paying as soon as I added users (which I did, until I switched to Fibery because of the permissions issues).
To clarify (for you and @mdubakov ), I was not saying that Fibery lacks these things. Only that they are one of the keys to Notion’s success (in my view). What Notion also did, that Fibery very much did not, is lean into the PKM marketing, and develop features like a public template sharing gallery which are very good sharing sources. I think the difference here (especially lately) is not so much that Notion is easier or has a better free plan (though that 10 db limit concern does seem legitimate, at least as an informational barrier, i.e. people don’t realize how easy it is to work within that for a lot of what they might do).
Yes, and as much as this aproach has frustrated me in the past, I think it’s a pretty clever way to incentivize the right kind of subscribers. Giving a taste of both types of expanded use (more DBs or more users), so you see the benefit of each, but you can’t combine them for the real power without paying. It’s the right kind of frustrating that I think incentivizes subscription to an appropriate degree.
I’ll add one more thing: if Fibery does go this approach, targeting students might be nice. It’s how I got into Notion personally.
I think in general, when it’s a personal tool, you have the time to explore it, tinker, learn, etc. When you’re using it in a team, it needs to be up and running much faster, any changes should be documented, etc.
Fibery takes time to learn, so letting people learn alone before they impliment it for their team might be an interesting way to get people in.
From my personal experience as a single user:
I started with Notion, which was my first time using software like this. It opened up a whole world of possibilities I didn’t even know existed. Also, it was easy to get into thanks to the many tutorials available.
However, my journey didn’t stay in Notion for long. I quickly moved to Coda because of its formulas and automation, which Notion didn’t yet offer at the time, or not to the same extent. But Coda started to feel very unreliable since the Grammarly acquisition. So Fibery was my next stop, although the limit of only 10 databases almost discouraged me. Still, I’m really glad I decided to go with Fibery in the end, and I wish to stay for a long time!
As non-code users, we miss out on a lot simply due to a lack of information and knowledge. It takes considerable time to understand how everything works, and that’s something I struggled with at the beginning. More short tutorials explaining how things function would have made a big difference. If I hadn’t already had experience with Notion and Coda, I honestly don’t think I would have managed.
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